IDEA: easy toggle between Priority to Programs / Background Services

[Curt]

This may be a little difficult for me to explain, I am afraid, because I hardly know the Danish terms and certainly not the English. But I got to ask myself: Do I feel lucky? And just now the answer is Yes, punk!

Most of the time it suits me fine to have Vista giving priority to the programs. But I have more than 6.000 images in a single folder, and to wait for Vista to refresh the thumbnails is a p@|n in the @$$. For this reason I would very much appreciate if it could be made easy to toggle between "Give priority to Programs" and "Give priority to Background Services". A simple AHK script.exe, maybe.

Please?

The option in Danish:

[attachimg=#]

[MilesAhead]

This freebie may be promising:

http://www.optionalreaction.com/software/PriorityControl_STATIC/

[Curt]

Thanks, but as far as I can understand it merely gives priority to programs, applications. The same job my Task Manager already is doing.

A priority control application sets the base priority for a specified application. An application with a high priority takes precedence over lower priority applications.

If you go to Control Panel >System >Advanced > Performance >Settings >Advanced, you will see the box from my image. Here you can change if Windows should have the processor weight applications or background services the most. This is the setting I want to toggle in an easy manner; per default it is buried way too deep.

[MilesAhead]

Press Windows-Pause key.  Click Advanced System Settings.  At least that goes on Vista.

[MilesAhead]

(edit: hang on... got to debug this a bit.  Trying to open that tab in control panel applet with AutoIt3 script.)

Okay, I couldn't figure out how to jump to tabs using the keyboard so I extrapolated until I got relative mouse coords.  You might have to change the numbers for MouseClick depending on your screen res(I use 1280x1024.)  But see if this AutoIt3 works:

Code

AutoItSetOption("MouseCoordMode",0)
Run("RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL sysdm.cpl,,3")
Sleep(250)
Send("{Space}")
Sleep(250)
MouseClick("primary",102,44)

Also if the dialog opens but not to the correct window or tab try adjusting the numbers in the Sleep() call.  The number is milliseconds.  I'm using 1/4 second delay.  Seems to work for most windows on my machines.

[Curt]

Wow, Miles, you really are ahead! (sorry!!!) Even though I have 1024x768 I didn't even have to change the mouse-clicks! Thank You!!

Also interesting to learn a little about au3... I have never been in contact with autoit before, so I had to first surf for info.  

----
"requests that have been implemented" 

[MilesAhead]

They have their similarities and differences.  From what I understand AHK branched off from AutoIt2.  AutoIt3 got away from the comma syntax. AutoIt3 syntax is more like basic or Rexx and it's just easier for me to figure out how to do what I want with it.  AHK makes doing mouse hotkey stuff easier so I tend to use it when that need arises.  I just wish I could mix them easily. I'd love to use some of my AutoIt3 dialogs and functions in AHK.  But that would be cheating!!

[SleepingWolf]

Okay, I couldn't figure out how to jump to tabs using the keyboard

Try using the keys Ctrl-Tab to jump from one tab to the next, with shift to go backwards if nec.

[f0dder]

Most of the time it suits me fine to have Vista giving priority to the programs. But I have more than 6.000 images in a single folder, and to wait for Vista to refresh the thumbnails is a p@|n in the @$$. For this reason I would very much appreciate if it could be made easy to toggle between "Give priority to Programs" and "Give priority to Background Services". A simple AHK script.exe, maybe.

Huh?

Changing that settings afaik only changes the timeslice threads get before another get scheduled... does that really matter wrt. loading image thumbnails?

(To do any benchmarking, you'd have to reboot the machine to exclude disk cache from the equation)

[MilesAhead]

Okay, I couldn't figure out how to jump to tabs using the keyboard

Try using the keys Ctrl-Tab to jump from one tab to the next, with shift to go backwards if nec.

Thanks for the info. I thought I tried all the permutations.  Guess I could have looked up the hotkey list.  But that would be cheating.  Besides, 1 mouse click did the trick.